Goal Conflict in Designing an Autonomous Artificial System
This addresses the challenge of ensuring safe and stable operation of autonomous systems for developers and society, but it is incremental as it builds on existing human psychology research without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of goal conflict in autonomous artificial systems by drawing parallels with human self-regulation mechanisms, and it examines the implications for system reliability, stability, and alignment with human goals and ethics.
Research on human self-regulation has shown that people hold many goals simultaneously and have complex self-regulation mechanisms to deal with this goal conflict. Artificial autonomous systems may also need to find ways to cope with conflicting goals. Indeed, the intricate interplay among different goals may be critical to the design as well as long-term safety and stability of artificial autonomous systems. I discuss some of the critical features of the human self-regulation system and how it might be applied to an artificial system. Furthermore, the implications of goal conflict for the reliability and stability of artificial autonomous systems and ensuring their alignment with human goals and ethics is examined.